Thank you very much to Orienteering Ottawa for presenting the Ottawa Sports Pages’ XC Week! Orienteering is like cross-country running, with a few extra exciting twists and turns. Find out about the adventure that awaits you here.
By Isabella Disley
Some of the faces have changed over the years, but the Nepean Knights’ Grade 12 senior girls have tasted nothing but victory at the national capital high school cross-country running championships.
On Oct. 23 at the Hornets Nest, the senior Knights captured their fourth consecutive team title with another unbeatable performance in the 20-team senior girls’ event.
“Being city champion for four years is great. That’s huge,” underlined lead Nepean runner Edie Petrescu-Comnene. “I’m really happy with how our team did. I’m super happy that we’ve made it for four years to OFSAA, so that’s pretty big.”
This year’s 10-point margin of victory was Nepean’s smallest of their four city titles, but the group won all their key battles to safely secure all the placement points they needed.
The Knights competed without a few key members of their 2022 OFSAA novice girls’ silver medal-winning lineup, but they’ve always been able to call on solid runners to lead the charge when others were unavailable.
Rugby player Tillie Pender had been the Knights’ top runner last season in sixth place at cities, while soccer player Molly Hale currently has three wins in three matches with Team Canada at the FIFA U17 Women’s World Cup.
Olivia Voros, who placed 20th at cities this year, will make her fourth OFSAA appearance alongside Petrescu-Comnene. Gabrielle Forestier (eighth) has become a key team member the past three seasons, while Grade 11 Charlotte Kelland (44th) stepped up this year, and Avery Magnusson (45th) ran for Nepean all four years and cracked her second OFSAA lineup.
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In Grade 9, Petrescu-Comnene got into cross-country, and shortly after, her friends joined too.
“We do a lot of things together in high school,” signalled the tennis player. “We went for a Starbucks run as a team. We sometimes go for runs together on the weekends, and we’ll have dinners together, and it’s pretty fun.”
The Knights wore a combination of purple and gold face paint, glitter and ribbons in their hair, artistically illustrating their school spirit.
Petrescu-Comnene covered the six-kilometre course in 23:24.6 to finish in third place for the first individual podium of her career in her final national capital XC race.
“Honestly, I think it was just, if we worked together as a team and all put in individual effort, that we’ll make it as a team, and the goal is to make it as a team, not really individually, but I’m obviously super happy that I came third,” Petrescu-Comnene highlighted.
“I think it’s a lot about being teammates rather than training, because we all have our own sports, but I think the team aspect is good.”
Laila Lebel was a double-silver medallist as an individual and her Colonel By Cougars team, which comfortably topped Glebe by 14 points for the second OFSAA qualifying position.
Lebel will be joined for the Nov. 1 provincials in Brampton by Jade Amberg (14th), Kathryn MacDonald (21st), Rosie Lee (48th) and Sophie Edwards (73rd).
Franco-Ouest’s Kyra Lauter won the individual gold medal by a solid gap of 1:12.8 in 21:41.3 for the largest margin of victory by far out of the six novice, junior and senior girls’ and boys’ races.
Lauter was introduced to cross-country in elementary school. At the time, she was playing soccer, so the conditioning was fairly similar. Lauter decided to try it out, liked it, and then joined the Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club. She now wants to pursue cross-country at a university and is currently in that process.
“I have a bunch of friends in the race, so it was nice,” Lauter indicated. “(The atmosphere) was really nice. Everybody’s cheering, everybody on.”
Franco-Ouest had just five runners entered across all divisions, but both Viking senior girls made it to OFSAA, with Myla Carleton claiming the last individual qualifying spot thanks to her seventh-place performance.
Also representing the national capital at OFSAA will be Immaculata’s Evelyn Davies (fourth), Hillcrest’s Emily Munro (fifth) and The Element’s Riley Daniels (sixth).
The Ottawa Sports Pages will be posting race-by-race recaps and photo galleries each weekday leading into the Nov. 1 OFSAA XC Championships. Find them all on our XC Week webpage, presented by Orienteering Ottawa.
NCXC25 Senior Girls’ Photo Gallery
